Google isn’t serving up headlines from Spain on Google News, and Spanish users can’t access Google News at all. The reason: a Spanish law that requires Google to pay for the use of headlines.

Google’s response: shutting down the service entirely. How did it get to this point?

Legislating Links

On December 16th 2014, Spain passed a law saying Spanish newspapers must be paid for content, even if they are willing to give it away for free. It sounds good for publishers – in fact, The Spanish Association of Daily Newspaper Publishers (AEDE – Asociación de Editores de Diarios) lobbied for it.

Traditional news publishers in Spain felt that Google benefits disproportionately from including their content – headlines and snipped – in Google News. The AEDE was pleased in 2012 when European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia stated that Google is dominant in several markets and is abusing that dominant position.

“This legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money […] this new approach was not sustainable.” via https://support.google.com/news/answer/6140047#English

The result: Google News is offline in Spain, and doesn’t show results from Spanish papers anywhere else.

(Translation: Download this extension to not generate traffic to AEDE)

As the above tweet mentions, many are even boycotting AEDE publications with the use of browser extensions like AEDE Blocker.

Predictably, with Google News dropped from the wire of Spanish headlines, Spanish publications aren’t seeing as much traffic as they used to. They lost anywhere from ten to fifteen percent of their regular traffic with the loss of Google News – and with it revenue.

Even the AEDE is backpedaling. AEDE said the closure of Google News “without a doubt will have a negative impact on citizens and Spanish companies”, and called for authorities to get involved. “AEDE requires the intervention of the Spanish and EU authorities and the competition authorities to protect the rights of citizens and businesses.”

Some Spanish lobbyists say that Spanish freedom of speech is being hurt by Google News not including links to their publications. They want Google to continue to continue to serve up Spanish headlines, and suggest that Google could ‘negotiate the fee’.

This is nonsense. It would be unfair and illogical to force a private company to provide a service and charge that company for it (negotiation or not).

Search Results the “Google Tax” Law Doesn’t Affect

As Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand explains, Spanish articles aren’t completely missing from Google – just from Google News. While readers won’t just be presented with all the news of the day, news articles are being inserted into ordinary search results when relevant. They’re being presented within search results under the headline En las noticias, meaning “In the news”.

How You Can Access Spanish News

If you are looking for news in Spanish on a particular topic, you can run your search in the ordinary search box (also known as Google Universal Search), and then narrow down results to Noticias (news) content.

All four of these other nations have worded their law such that a publisher can demand payment, but is not required to – a key difference from Spain’s approach.

Final Thoughts

I can hardly believe it’s not obvious to everybody: the relationship that Google has with web content creators has always been reciprocal and mutually beneficial. The Internet would be a very different place without search engines freely linking to all the content their robots can find – it’s hard to imagine being able to find sites without them.

Do you think search engines benefit more than they ought to from the work of web content creators, or are they providing a service we all need? What kind of relationship would you like to see search engines have with web creators? Should search engine inclusion be perhaps opt-in instead of opt-out?

Well, if you live here in Spain, you will be not surprised at all for this kinds of laws.....there's a lot of them very similar, all of them dictated by what in the article is called "corruptocracy"...for example, just google "sun tax spain"....you will be very surprised

Google Tax is just a euphemism for European-Anti-Americanism. All of the companies pushing against Google (and MS before them) are European. I am from Asia and we're glad to have Google's free services.